Earlier this week I had a total recipe fail and I was a bit discouraged since I haven’t had much time in the kitchen lately, but then I took a step back and realized I needed to get back to my roots. Simple recipes, with simple ingredients, and lots of flavor. So I decided to take advantage of a sale on Italian sausage (one of my favorite “short cut” ingredients) and whip up this incredibly filling Italian Sausage and White Bean Skillet.
Automatic Seasoning with Sausage
One of the reasons I love working with Italian sausage is because it’s packed with all the herbs and spices that you would normally add one by one to a recipe. So when I start a dish with Italian sausage, I rarely have to season it with anything later. The sausage does all the work for me. Yay!
To retain all the flavor from the sausage, I did not drain the fat from the skillet, but rather used it as a sort of sauce or dressing to coat the white beans and spinach with flavor. I added some freshly cracked pepper and that’s it. I used hot Italian sausage because that’s what was on sale, but you can use mild or sweet varieties as well.
How to Serve Italian Sausage and White Bean Skillet
This Italian sausage and White Bean Skillet is so extremely versatile that I wanted to give you a few variations. I decided to go with a “one skillet” and low-er carb version because those recipes seem to be quite popular lately, but you can lower the cost and stretch this meal out by replacing some of the sausage, beans, or spinach with 8oz. of cooked pasta, preferably orecchiette, which is a flat, disk-like shape. If you can’t find spinach for a low price like I did (thank you, Aldi!!), you can cut the amount of spinach in half and still have a great dish, or use frozen chopped spinach.
Want more Italian Sausage recipes? Check out our Italian Sausage Recipe Archives!
Italian Sausage and White Bean Skillet
Servings 4 about 1.5 cups eachIngredients
- 1 lb. Italian sausage (hot, mild, or sweet) ($3.49)
- 1 Tbsp olive oil ($0.13)
- 2 15oz. cans cannellini beans* ($1.10)
- 8 oz. spinach ($1.49)
- Freshly cracked black pepper ($0.05)
Instructions
- Remove the casing from the sausage and add the sausage to a large deep skillet, or wide bottomed soup pot, along with the olive oil. Sauté the sausage over medium heat, breaking it into pieces as you go, until the sausage is cooked through, brown, and crispy on the edges (about 10 minutes).
- While the sausage is cooking, rinse and drain the cannellini beans. Once the sausage is brown and crispy, add the beans and some freshly cracked pepper to the skillet. Gently stir the beans into the sausage to coat them in the fat, and allow them to heat through.
- As the beans are heating through, roughly chop the spinach. Add the spinach to the skillet or pot in batches, gently stirring it into the sausage and beans until it wilts down. Once the spinach is mostly wilted, turn the heat off. Taste the mixture and add salt if needed (this will depend on the salt content of your sausage and beans). Serve hot.
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Equipment
Notes
Nutrition
Have you tried this recipe?Mention @budgetbytes or tag #budgetbytes on Instagram!How to Make Sausage and White Bean Skillet – Step by Step Photos
This recipe started with this awesome sale on Italian sausage. This whole package, which is actually slightly larger than 1 lb. was only $3.49. This recipe is very flexible and forgiving, so you can use a little less, a little more, or exactly 1 lb. Italian sausage, and it can be hot, mild, or sweet.
Remove the casing from the sausage and then add the sausage to a large deep skillet, or a wide-bottomed pot with 1 Tbsp olive oil. Sauté the sausage over medium heat, breaking it into pieces as it cooks, until the sausage pieces are brown and crispy. Don’t stop when it’s simply cooked through, keep going until the moisture evaporates and the edges start to sizzle in the oil and turn brown.
While the sausage is cooking, rinse and drain two 15oz. cans of cannellini beans. Cannellini beans are better than navy beans or great northern beans because they are larger, hold up better, and have a great creamy flavor. The smaller beans that tend to break down are better suited for soups and things where you’ll want them to break down and help thicken the mixture.
Once the sausage is crispy, add the drained beans and gently stir to combine. Add some freshly cracked pepper and allow the beans to heat through with the sausage.
I’m lucky enough to be able to buy this 8oz. bag of fresh spinach for $1.49, but if you can’t get a deal like this you can either reduce the spinach by half, or use frozen spinach in its place. The only downside to using the frozen spinach is that the texture and appearance will not be as good. Instead of being tender, the frozen spinach will be a bit more stringy. Actually frozen broccoli florets (chopped into small pieces) would also be pretty awesome with this.
Roughly chop the spinach and add it to the skillet in batches, stirring it just until it wilts down, and then adding the next batch.
Once all the spinach has been added and it is mostly wilted (you want it to still have a little body, not totally cooked down), give everything a taste and add salt or pepper if needed. My skillet was so extremely flavorful, even without adding anything else. It’s amazing! The amount of seasoning needed at the end will likely depend on the salt and spice content of your sausage and beans, so it may vary from brand to brand.
Dinner doesn’t get easier than this. :)
This looks amazing! I plan to make it Labor Day weekend. Thanks!
Love the simplicity of this dish! I haven’t had sausage in a long time and this looks too good to pass up. Thanks for the recipe!
Kroger actually sells Italian sausage outside of the casing for the same price!
I just made it and it’s tasty. Am wondering if it is safe to reheat since it has so much spinach in it?
Yes, there is nothing particularly unsafe about reheating spinach. :)
Regarding fresh vs frozen spinach – the best frozen spinach I’ve used is from Bird’s Eye. Admittedly, I’m a brand-name frozen veggie girl for flavor reasons, so I haven’t tried too many brands. At any rate, for a while the only frozen blocks at my store were Green Giant, and they were indeed stringy like you said and I used fresh unless I was suuuuper short on time. But I find that the Birds Eye blocks are more consistently leafy and not stringy. The leaves are chopped smaller than I’d do from fresh, but in a skillet dish like this I usually don’t mind. :)
This is good to know, Lillian. It’s sometimes hard to choose at the store, all the various brands saying they’re the best. It’s good to have a specific recommendation. I will check out Bird’ Eye for sure. Thanks.
I’m looking forward to making this recipe shortly. If I were to make this dish, is it possible that I can use either bow tie or small shelled pasta? I’m unable to find orecchiette in my area. Thanks, Beth!! :-)
Yep, you can use any shape you like, but I just thought the orecchiette would be particularly nice. :)
I made this for dinner tonight and the hubs and I both LOVED it! Next time I’m going to try adding some diced red pepper in with the sausage and maybe some diced tomatoes to lighten it up a bit.
I absolutely love the new feature to adjust the recipe for the number of servings!!
This looks yummy! I’ll bet you could substitute swiss chard for the spinach (which is free from my garden at this time of year)
Absolutely. Swiss chard sounds amazing for this! :)
Fast and YUM!! Served this with some leftover rice
Could you please share your recipe fail with us? If it is not too painful?😄 We can learn from it, and it has happened to all of us!
It was some turkey meatball subs/sliders. I can’t pinpoint exactly what was wrong with them, they just didn’t wow me. :) And the photos were terrible because I’m still learning the light in my new house. LOL
Could you please tell us about your recipe fail? If you can bring yourself to?😄 We can learn from that too!
Hi Miss Beth! Thanks to your thrifty tip and easy directions, I’ve come to realize that making black beans and garbanzo beans at home adds quite a different texture and flavor experience than the quick and easy can version of the same items. The difference is amazing and motivates me to make ahead and freeze for “quick” use during the week. Do you think the cannellini beans recommended for this skillet are something easily picked up in a bag at the grocery store and cooked at home too? Asking for a friend…because you know cooking brings me NO joy (ha ha!) I can’t wait to try this recipe (sorry for your recipe fail earlier this week, but thanks for returning to your roots and sharing this ‘un!)
How easy dry Cannellini beans are to find will depend on where you live. They are definitely easy to cook at home and freeze well. A good substitute for Cannellini beans if you live in the US and can’t find them at your local grocery store are dry Great Northern beans, which tend to be a bit less expensive and easier to find in some areas. I used some Great Northern beans from my freezer tonight in a modified version of this dish and it turned out wonderfully.
You can definitely cook cannellini beans at home, but do not use a slow cooker. Cannellini beans are in the kidney bean family and need to be boiled (a hard, full boil) for at least ten minutes to break down a natural compound that can be toxic to our digestive system. The only issue is that the beans can tend to break down and lose their shape when boiled like this, so it’s tricky. That’s why for this bean I prefer canned. :)
That looks delicious, and also fits the bill perfectly for some nutritional deficiencies I’ve been dealing with. I’ll probably mix it with some pasta and a little bit of leftover pasta water for a light sauce.
This looks delicious!